Howdy, friends! It’s Sunday and after one beer 🙂 I felt the need to write a bit on the blog. I recently discussed with one friend who is struggling with procrastination & laziness and he made me think about my methods for combating this bad boy.
I will start by saying that, during my life, I’ve tried several methods to improve my focus and eliminate procrastination (from physical journals, online journals to motivational videos, apps etc) and what I realized is that the power does not come from the method itself but from the mindset. Yes, the method can give you a pushup, but that’s it. For example the tasks that I am struggling with, and I absolutely hate them, are things like “washing clothes, clean apartment, buy food, cook”, and unfortunately, I have to do these things almost daily. The one I enjoy is actually work-related, they don’t feel like work to me, that’s why I affirm the mindset is everything.
Since I am not trying to sell you something on this blog, I will add a disclaimer, The method I am using will not be necessarily effective for you. Every human is different, we have a different work ethic different goals and mindsets. That’s why you need to test & learn. Find a method, try it out, fail, go to the next one!
Ok, now let me tell you how I function. What I like to do is to reward myself for every successful task. This concept is very very old. And it is used very frequently in the children’s education and animals as well. But somehow from a certain point of life, we forget about this method or we expect that somebody else will reward us for our personal achievements.
How does your dog get motivated to do a specific thing? Because he knows he will get rewarded if he is a good boy 🙂 Next time when you finish that assignment at school: reward yourself with a chocolate. Next time when you deliver that long waited paper for your boss, order some sushi 🙂 .
Another thing equally important: Define the prize/reward before starting the task. In this way, you will motivate the brain and build hype around the task.
For the ones, at the beginning of the road, this habit can get pricey, fortunately, there is a solution to this. Since I’m an incurable gamer I constantly try to gamify my life. Essentially, exactly like in a video game your level can be your age, bank account a number that increases as you build more experience and so on.
What is Gamification? Gamification is the application of game-design elements and game principles in non-game contexts such as life. And that’s exactly what habitica.com does. I treat my life like a game to stay motivated and organized, it makes it simple to have fun while I am accomplishing my goals.
In Habitica you have 3 tables. You put your Habits, your Daily goals, and your To-Do list.
This is my character and when I check off tasks my character level up and unlock features and even quest(opportunities) exactly like in real life!
For every completed task, you receive gold, with gold you can purchase armor, weapons, potions to improve your character. The community is formed from more than 2.5 million players and I already interact with some of them from my guild “Designers & Entrepreneurs”.
This is what works for me now, maybe in the future, it will be under another form, but the concept will be the same “plan-complete-reward”. Thank you for taking the time to read this blog post.
Remember: Reward yourself.
I hope this was helpful for you and make sure to check my 1 million dollar journey.
